The Best Fine Dining Burgers Are a Gift to Us All

The chef burger is egalitarian: cheap enough to be a staple, fancy enough to make you feel special.

If you’re a person with generally bourgeois tastes but you don't say, rack up the most hotel points of all your friends, you’re probably indebted to the burger whether you acknowledge it or not. The mainstay of many a menu is almost always cheaper than everything else a restaurant—trendy gastropub, farm-to-table restaurant, French bistro, or neo-fusion-y Asian joint—serves. The burger is egalitarian. The burger empathizes with both your wallet and your gullet. The burger is often an opportunity to sample a certain chef’s food without dropping, say, $50 for her ribeye. Here, we’ve compiled some of the most innovative bun-meat-toppings-bun combinations around the country—because you never know when you’ll be looking for a birthday dinner or date night that needs to taste spendy but feel thrifty(ish).

The Morimoto Championship Burger, Morimoto Napa
There are two approaches to California wine country. You can tastefully attend tours and tastings and learn about the fermentation process from the pros (and maybe even take home a bottle or two), or you can, uh, get pretty hammered on wine in the presence of very beautiful rolling hills. In both scenarios, the Morimoto Championship Burger is a good option to know about. These folks have swapped a regular patty for menchi-katsu (think breaded, deep fried beef), which is great for absorbing all that alcohol and preventing future headaches. It’s nestled in with a slaw of Napa cabbage, pickled carrots, jalapeno, and kimchi tartar sauce (for the sophisticate somewhere deep inside of you). Take note, the burger is only served as lunch or as part of Morimoto Napa’s late-night “lounge menu” which rolls out after 10 PM.

The “Secret Burger” at Waypoint in Cambridge, MA
Waypoint is first and foremost a seafood joint, but don’t let that trick you into overlooking the burger. Well, technically, you can’t really look for the burger, because it’s an off-menu item that the Waypoint team serves until they run out. (Chef Michael Scelfo also brings the “secret burger” model to farm-to-table crowdpleaser Alden & Harlow, his other restaurant in Harvard Square). Waypoint’s patty is a combination of brisket, short rib, and beef, and just in case that isn’t enough mammalian variety for you, there’s also a healthy layer of bacon. But –– bear with me –– the real magic is in the celery root-and-seed bun, which sounds healthy and therefore unsatisfying, but totally melts in your mouth.

The Okonomiyaki Burger at Hinoki & The Bird, Los Angeles
In Japanese, okonomiyaki means “grilled as you like it”—and there are countless varieties of veggies and proteins that can be used in this grilled savory pancake. At Hinoki & The Bird, it’s stuffed with fish flakes, aioli, nori, pickled carrots, and pickled peppers, topped off with white cheddar and some pickled fresno peppers, and tucked inside a sweet potato bun. Pro tip: it pairs perfectly with the rummy, coconutty Muay Thai Tea.

Wild Boar Burger at Dai Due, Austin
If you’re a particularly lucky or particularly souther person, chances are someone you know from that part of the country has whipped up a batch of pimento cheese, brought it to a party, and instantly become more beloved among your friends than you will ever hope to be. The staff at Dai Due know this feeling, which is why their burger rests on a gratuitous serving of the stuff. Their Wild Boar Burger is all about testing your commitment to excess: bacon, boar, pimento cheese, BBQ sauce, and jalapeño. Pair it with a beer from their extensive, well-curated list of cans and drafts.

Chargrilled Lamb Burger at The Breslin in Manhattan
Lamb isn’t for everyone, and not everyone can pull off lamb. It can taste gamey, smell kind of funky, and make you lust after good old beef if it’s not cooked properly. The Breslin, chef April Bloomfield’s gastropub inside the Ace Hotel, is one of those places that succeeds in showing lamb the respect it deserves. The chargrilled lamb burger is an amalgamation of different cuts that creates peak tenderness (lamb shoulder is the game-changer here), and swaps in feta cheese for plain; the cumin mayo is so good you’ll want to take a pint of it home. Sure, $27 is a hefty price tag to pay for something you’re used to paying way less for, but this is a burger that demands respect—and pairs well with a regular old beer.

Haus Burger at Boeufhaus Chicago
With burgers, the pesky thing getting in the way between bun and patty is usually lettuce, but at Boeufhaus, it’s frisée, which adds a uniquely peppery twang to an otherwise fairly straightforward production: patty made of strip, hangar, and tenderloin (this is the big leagues, one cut of meat in the patty just isn’t going to cut it), accompanied by the usual suspects like onion and pickle. The real magic at Bouefhaus lies in the bouef fat fries, which come on the side of the burger order and are every bit as decadent as the spelling suggests. These are the kinds of fries you don’t need aioli or ketchup for (but no judgement if you, like me, are a slave to your condiments).